Wednesday, February 25, 2015

As Stewart did during the the Brian Williams affair,
in which the NBC anchor was caught peddling a bogus war story, he urged
viewers to put media scandals in perspective as more consequential lies
emerge on the world stage.

"Here's the problem: World outrage supplies are finite, and if we
spend so much of it on the fairly inconsequential status embellishments,
our anger tanks could be empty when we need them most!" Stewart said.

Case in point: Reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahi may have knowingly misled the United Nations on Iran's capacity to produce nuclear weapons, contradicting Israel's own intelligence.

Still a good point...you know which one is going to get more media coverage...and it isn't the lie that could get people killed.

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

I suppose it is too much to expect other cultures to know all of our nation's taboos, but you'd think other than Canada and perhaps Mexico, there'd be enough cross-cultural pollination with the UK for them to be a bit more aware.

The popular U.S. donut chain Krispy Kreme was forced to apologize
Tuesday after one of its branches in the U.K. advertised a new series of
children's events called "KKK Wednesdays."

The ill-advised national campaign was meant to be "a series of
planned events for children during a week-long break from school," the Hull Daily Mail reported.

It didn't take long for people to point out that the "Krispy Kreme
Klub" abbreviation evoked the Ku Klux Klan once the donut chain posted
the event on its Facebook page. The post was later deleted.

Well, considering it misspelled three consecutive common words, it really wasn't educational either.

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

An ongoing dispute over an apartment parking space may have led to
the shooting deaths of three Muslim college students in North Carolina,
but investigators are trying to determine if the killings could also
have been hate-motivated, police said Wednesday.

Craig Stephen
Hicks, 46, who turned himself in to the Chatham County Sheriff's Office,
has been charged with three counts of first-degree murder in the fatal
shootings Tuesday afternoon at an apartment building in Chapel Hill.

The
victims, all shot in the head, were identified as Deah Shaddy Barakat,
23, and his wife, Yusor Mohammad, 21, of Chapel Hill, and Razan Mohammad
Abu-Salha, 19, of Raleigh, police said. The two female victims were
sisters.

And, as always seems to be the case, what a loss.

Barakat, a second-year dental student at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Yusor Mohammad were married in late
December. They traveled to Turkey last year to provide free dental care
to students, according to their friends' Facebook page.

In a series of Facebook posts obtained by ThinkProgress, the senior
adviser for policy and communications to Rep. Aaron Schock (R-IL) posted
racial comments and endorsed gentrification of his neighborhood.

Benjamin Cole, a former Baptist pastor and energy industry spokesman,
posted a series of videos and comments on October 13, 2013 mocking two
African Americans outside his DC apartment. In the first, he compared
them to animals escaping from the National Zoo engaged in “mating
rituals.”

And in battling stereotypes let us not forget Mr. Cole looks EXACTLY like you are presently imaging.